Amelia Courthouse
The “hymnambient” music of Leah Toth (Wooden Wand)—alter ego amelia courthouse—was seeded decades ago, when as a teenager she became the organist in her local southern Alabama church. “I remember being a little girl and thinking about, for the first time, melody and harmony. I stood beside my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, singing these rough, beautiful Carter Family-style harmonies on hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “I Love to Tell the Story.” Just thinking about her voice all these years later gives me the best kind of chill bumps. When I was in high school she would come over and I would play her favorite hymns, and she would just sing and sing.”
While her academic work concerns the way modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote sound on the page, courthouse’s hymnambient music does the reverse: it retrieves, exhumes, and privileges the audible past to establish new narratives, bringing to life the hallowed sounds of antiquity.
Videos & Press
“Graceful and full, with a patience for small details that unfold over time, the music breathes and lifts, splintering like sunlight through paned glass. It conjures, capturing light and space and releasing it back into the world as waves of sound. The music is absorbing and hypnotic, achieving a liturgical effect, holding me, the tree, the man and the fading sunlight for one brief transcendent moment.”
Selected Press for ruby glass:
Aquarium Drunkard, “Bandcamping::Winter 2020,” by Tyler Wilcox
Bandcamp Daily, “Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: November 2019,” by Marc Masters
Dusted, Review, by Jennifer Kelly
NPR Music, “Viking’s Choice: Tender Ambient, Blossom Punk, Fist-Pumping Shred,” by Lars Gotrich
Tome to the Weather Machine, “Top 50 of 2019,” by Ryan Hall
